


What to do in Winter

by Firebird_Falling



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Byleistr - Freeform, Established Relationship, Fluff and Humor, Helbindi - Freeform, M/M, Skiing, Snowboarding, Tony is Mortal and Loki is Worried, Vacation on Jotunheim, redeemed loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 10:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18163922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firebird_Falling/pseuds/Firebird_Falling
Summary: Loki just wanted to do the right thing for once. He should have known things would get out of hand when he decided to include Tony Stark.-or-How to bring snow sports to Jotunheim and give Loki a heart attack at the same time.





	What to do in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to JanecShannon for the idea. It's slightly less crack-y than I wanted, but whatever.
> 
> Also, warning, not beta'd yet. I'm disappearing on vacation for a few weeks and didn't want to let this winter themed fic linger into spring. But feel free to give me list of what's wrong with it and I'll fix it eventually?

 

\--

 

It was ten in the morning and the living room of Loki and Tony's personal floor of the tower was filled with stuff. Boxes and boxes of stuff. Bags on top of boxes, and bags within bags. Loki stared over it with dread in his eyes. This couldn't possibly be what he thought it was. There was no way. Not even Amora traveled with this many effects, and she was the biggest clothes-horse he knew.

All hopes were dashed, however, as Tony strolled into the room, suspiciously bright eyed and awake for that hour of the morning. He was holding two more bags, one tall and thin, one smaller and lumpy. He dumped them on top of the piles.

"Morning darling!" he crowed, sliding up and pressing a kiss to Loki's unresponsive lips. "Ready to go?"

"No," Loki replied blandly. He was still in pajama bottoms, shirtless and his hair was a mess. What kind of question was that? Also, there was no way he was dealing with Tony when he'd had this much time to over-plan things. He disentangled himself from his partner's arms and went over to the coffee machine. Curse the blasted mortal for getting him attached to the beverage.

"Well chop-chop, get a move on, I'm almost done!"

"No you're not," Loki countered, adding sugar to his caffeine. "Look at everything you have to unpack."

Tony faltered. The dark haired god watched as the engineer looked over the small mountain of supplies that had invaded their living space. The eyes landed back on his. "Unpack?" he sidled up and slid one of Loki's arms around his waist. "Why would I have to unpack? You said we were going to Jotunheim today."

"Mhmm," he nodded, sipping his coffee. "So I did. So we are."

"I don't see the problem," Tony said, reaching for the coffee mug. Loki held it out of his reach.

Ignoring the petulant glare, the taller of the two smirked down. "I said we're taking a trip, not moving permanently."

"You said it was cold, icy, boring and stuck in the stone ages. So I packed for a prehistoric ice age."

"It's a five day surveying trip."

"So?"

"I'm not carrying that," Loki stated, gesturing at Tony's collection.

Somehow, his lover had the gall to look affronted. "Why? You have that quantum spacefold pocket dimension thing."

"Which somehow doesn't mean that I'm willing to transport the sum of the contents of your closets to another realm."

The mortal gasped theatrically. "It's not the entire contents of my closet! At least half of that comes from my workshop!"

"Half of this is clothing?!" the immortal cried, aghast.

"I said 'at least!' There are not that many clothes in here; it's mostly portable shop stuff!"

"I'm still not doing it." Because mechanical and potentially useful or not, there was still way too much stuff present for a five day trip. For goodness sake, the man claimed to specialize in doing everything better, faster and _smaller._ There was nothing small about the pile.

"Loki, darling, babe, I saw you re-furnish the entire vacation home last summer with stuff you pulled out of your magical nowhere. You can't possibly say you don't have space. You have three couches, a four poster bed, half of Snape's potions lab and an entire armory in there."

Well. He wasn't entirely wrong. But Loki still eyed the collection of stuff warily. "Which is why I know that not all of this is going to fit," he lied. He wasn’t a packhorse, a butler or a freaking supply convoy. He had dignity after all.

Tony looked up at him, peering through his lashes and looking like a cat that had caught a very fat hen. "So you're saying that you, my immortal space wizard prince, have a limit on the area of your invisible bag of holding? You're saying that you can't do something."

Loki's expression clearly didn’t express the extent of his disdain for his lover's tactics, because Tony's grin only widened. "Magic has limits." Loki begrudged. Letting his lover think he'd won something was better than the inevitable feeling of being exploited and having his magic dismissed as a simple, convenient parlor trick. It had happened before, and while he was rather fond of this mortal, he'd learned his lessons a little too well.

"You may bring half of this…" he waved his hand at the collection- "mess."

Unfortunately, Tony was a businessman. "Or," he smiled hopefully, "you could leave a bit of your other stuff behind and make room for all of it?"

Loki was unimpressed. "You want me to leave my one of a kind, hand carved and highly sentimental furnishings, gifted to me by my mother, and hailing from Asgard, a realm from which I am banished, behind. In your tower. Which has been bombed by three separate villains in the last month."

Tony pouted. "Well, not when you put it that way."

"Half."

He sighed. "Half."

 -

After lunch, Loki dared to go back to the main living area and sighed in relief at the size of the pile. He swept the whole of it into his pocket dimension, wrapped his arm around his partner and delayed only long enough to ensure that his foolish mortal was in fact closing his eyes before stepping onto the branches of Yggdrasil.

They stepped out a few kilometers from the edges of Urtgard, Jotunheim's capital, and the biting winds alerted the mortal to their arrival.

"Oooh, this is nice!" Tony said, looking around.

Well that wasn't the reaction he'd been expecting. Loki tried to follow his gaze, but all he saw were craggy blue-white mountains and desolation.

"Which direction is the city?" Tony said, already kneeling down and digging through the bag he had insisted on carrying himself.

"That way," Loki gestured. His mortal beamed at him in acknowledgement. The idiot was shivering already, bundled as he was in a fur lined hood and a jacket that was called 'parka.' Somehow the mortal was unperturbed enough to still smile.

The engineer punched a few numbers into the device he had unearthed from his bag. Then he rose, an oblong metal canister held upright in his hands. The top was tapered nicely, but with a triple tap on to the nose cone, a repulsor booted up at the flat base, and the thing lifted out of its maker's hands. It wobbled a little as the gyroscope stabilized in the wind, and then shot off towards one of the eastern mountains, the glow from the repulsor fading quickly behind the light flurry of snow.

Tony unleashed two more little drones, one to each side of the city, before beaming at his Aesir guide and taking Loki's ungloved fingers in his own mitted palm. They walked steadily, through the thinnest drifts of snow that they could find, with Tony staring around in apparent wonder the entire time. "It's so clean," he thought he heard the man whisper.

Not for the first time, he wondered what it was like to live in a world where Jotun weren't known and feared- where the realm of Frost Giants wasn't the setting of evil monsters of his childhood. What did the mortal see when he looked at the glaciers and the cold black mountains they grew from? What was fascinating about the planes of ice that made up the foothills that would have been farmland in any other realm. It was all frozen dead.

Initially, Loki had been concerned about inviting his lover to join him on Jotunheim. He'd spent quite a while thinking it over. Almost a year, actually. But in the end, he couldn't imagine any other circumstances in which he could do this, than those where he had Tony at his side. Tony had been the one to give him a chance when he'd been sent to Midgard to atone. Tony had been the one to house him, encourage him, listen to him. He'd teased and bribed and bantered and been the source of every good thing that Loki could remember since he'd been cast out of Asgard. And he'd been the one to give Loki hope that maybe, just maybe, trying to be a better person wasn't a doomed cause.

So he had eventually come to desire repentance for his other crimes. The crimes he actually felt responsible for. Norns, if he'd had Tony in his life a century ago, half a millennia ago, would he have been even half as jaded as he was now? What must the Allfather think of his plan now? He'd be suspicious, no doubt.

But here he was, on Jotunheim, with the permission of their king, to survey the land and see what kind of help he might be in repairing their land and their city from the damage he'd done to it with the Bifrost.

For whatever reason, Tony had managed to maintain a period of silence on their walk, and Loki was thankful for it. He seemed prone to melancholy on this realm, and he didn't want to ruin his partner's thrill with his own sour airs. But when the crumbling walls of the city came into focus, the floodgates opened and the questions poured out.

"So, where are we staying?"

"We are guests of the king; we will stay where he puts us."

"Are we going to meet him?"

"Yes, straightaway."

"Is he friendly? Do I need to be polite? Did you tell him I'm coming?"

"Yes, Tony-"

"I hope you warned him about me. The last time someone asked me to be polite to royalty, I accidentally insulted her sister, mother and son in one sitting. Should we have brought gifts? Preemptive apology gifts?"

"I don't think so, but most of your eccentricities we can pass of as cultural differences. Though the Jotun are known for holding grudges, so do try not to do anything too insulting."

Tony gave him a skeptical raised eyebrow. "How do I address him? What's his name again?"

"His name is Helbindi-"

"Oh god, I'm going to butcher that-"

"You can call him Your Majesty, or Your Grace, but since you're not his subject, you can avoid the My King moniker."

"Great, good, names that don't require me to say his name. Love those. We don’t have to sit through meetings do we? Does he have some sort of council that we have to contend with? Or is this an absolute monarchy? Dictatorship?"

"There might be a few meetings, yes-"

The guards at the city gates were very large, very imposing and very surly, but they let the pair pass and after that, the stream of questions transitioned over to cultural and architectural. Questions for which Loki didn't really have answers, but was happy to postulate about. By the time they got to the throne room, Loki had quite forgotten his melancholy.

 - 

Helbindi was short for a giant. That said, he was still at least five feet taller than Loki, which meant he was quite literally twice Tony's height.

So naturally, as soon as formal introductions were done, and an opportunity presented itself, Tony was bounding up to the king and offering his diminutive hand out for a Midgardian greeting.

The only saving grace to the whole scenario was that King Helbindi seemed just as off kilter from the move as Loki was. He seemed even more taken aback when Stark said "Nice place you've got here" and seemed to genuinely mean it.

They retired to a semi private chamber, of course. There was no reason that the whole court had to be involved in the logistics of a surveying mission, but the door, or rather, archway, to the room was pretty easily accessible to passers-by, so they weren't exactly meeting in private. Two of Helbindi's advisers were in attendance as well- his younger brother, Byleistr, and an older, taller, craggier Giant by the name of Jorlhind. The engineer seemed more than happy to let Loki take the reins on the political maneuvering and magical jargon, interjecting only when Loki proposed technological options that he couldn't properly explain to the Jotun. Instead, he fussed around with a data pad that he'd squirreled away into a pocket. The other three at the table seemed a bit insulted at first, but begrudgingly followed Loki's lead in allowing the human to poke at his device. Loki had long since learned that just because Tony wasn't visually attentive, it didn't mean he wasn't listening closely. The giants seemed to assume it was normal after a while.

The group broke for lunch after they'd settled on which areas need the most surveying and what kind of fix they would like to aim for in the various Bifrost damaged areas. Loki was in charge of inspecting the Leylines, and Tony the structural stability of the ice and ground beneath it. Helbindi and Jorlhind seemed to think this would take more than their allotted five days, but Tony waved them off and began quizzing the pair on the kinds of fish they ate and the root vegetable that they used as a starch.

"It tastes like someone mixed a potato and a beet. Which is odd, because beets, on Midgard get their flavor from the soil, but these are grown mostly on ice, where are they getting the minerals that flavor them?"

"Mostly from the mountain runoff in the spring. They grow where the water from underneath the glaciers is forced upward to release pressure, and it takes the minerals with it."

"Huh. That's actually pretty neat. Are those runoff places common?"

"In some areas more than others. There are not many around here, but the other side of the western mountains has some fair floes."

"What about the oceans? Are they super salty?"

"Yes. And very cold. And covered in ice all the time."

"That's awesome. Midgard has some ice sheets that extend over the ocean on the south pole, but we don't know much about it, outside of the fish having antifreeze for blood. Really interesting biology there. Speaking of- how do you guys deal with the cold? I asked Reindeer Games over there, but he didn't know. I kinda figured you'd be endothermic, but at really low levels, but I'm guessing now that that's wrong. Ectothermic? Poikilothermic? Antifreeze? Honestly, I'm mostly confused because of the lack of clothing. I mean, as insulation, not culturally. Don't answer if that's rude."

At his side, Loki lowered his head into his hands. "Yes, this is normal. My apologies for his lack of a filter," he muttered in Elvish, so that the Allspeak would pick it up.

Tony flicked at the ear nearest him. "Rude, Gandalf." He didn't ask for a translation though. The giants seemed amused.

-

They retired to a neatly furnished room on the southern side of the crumbling palace. It got more light, and consequently was expected to be just a little less cold than the other wings. Also, the other guest wing to the north had collapsed when the Bifrost had destabilized the nearby ice. Just another thing that Loki needed to have on his fledgling conscience. Helbindi had tried to give them a pair of adjacent rooms, but Tony had happily disabused him of the notion. He didn't even let Loki politely accept for the sake of plausible deniability and politics. Thankfully, Jorlhind had been the only one to look at them strangely.

They curled up on the overly stiff mattress, under half a dozen fur throws, and two warming spells.

"So, what did you think?" the god asked, quietly.

"Cold." He could feel the smile that his mortal was pressing to his chest. "Nice, though. About what I expected, really."

How did the man think like this? He hugged his human closer, his source of mysteriously unending curiosity and hope.

-

The next morning they broke fast with Byleistr, as Helbindi was off with some other duties. The meal was some sort of freeze dried fish pellets and a pale blue plant made into a salad. Not altogether horrible, by Loki's standard. Tony, on the other hand, pushed the leaves around on the plate as though he were a pampered child.

"Just pretend they're not vegetables," the mage advised. He was met with a look that was more sleeplessness than irritation. "Doctor Banner will be most disappointed in you if you don't at least make an effort."

The look in Tony's eyes made a solid effort at becoming a glare, but the man hadn't had coffee that morning, and it showed.

Loki sighed and reached into his pocket. "Fine," he capitulated, setting down a thermos of coffee and a small container of chocolate covered espresso beans that he'd packed on the side.

"I love you," came the immediate reply.

"I should hope so, after all I put up with," Loki muttered.

"Huh? Oh. Yes, I love you too, Lo."

Vindictively, Loki stuffed a small handful of the cold blue salad into his partner's mouth, making him sputter incoherently. That was when Helbindi finally showed up. He raised one blue eyebrow, but after the previous day's interaction, he'd clearly given up making sense of the Midgardian.

"Good to see you survived the night," the king rumbled. "Have you set a plan for the day?"

Tony still had a mouthful of weird vegetation, so Loki answered with perfectly innocent smile. "Of course. We'll be starting on the western end of the Bifrost track and mapping our way towards the city."

Tony choked down his food and spitefully corrected with "you can map from the western edge, I’m going to check out the mountains." Then he stabbed another bunch of leaves with the odd, two pronged fork they'd been supplied with, and stuffed it angrily into his mouth.

"The western mountains?" Helbindi asked, eyebrows climbing higher.

"I like the look of the slopes there. And also, I want a peek at those glaciers. I'll meet back up with you for lunch, though, don't worry," he added, speaking to Loki.

"Suit yourself," the god said. "You found something interesting in the scans then?"

Tony gave him a noncommittal hum, and a "maybe. We'll have to see later. I'll set up a work station then, when I've got most of the data."

"Will you need me to unload your equipment in the afternoon then?"

"Actually, if you wouldn't mind dumping it somewhere before you go, that'd be great. I want a few things from the pile."

"Is there a work room we could use, Your Majesty?" Loki asked.

"Mahrohdr can show you," the king said, waving a darkly colored giant over from one of the walls.

Loki was done eating, and Tony was only eating out of spite at that point, so they followed the new giant to a mostly empty room in the same wing as their bedchamber. Loki dumped the entirety of the mortal's toys into the middle of the floor. The engineer jumped on the pile, rooting through it until he got to a few lumpy looking packages wrapped in canvas. Loki, always curious about the mortal's new technology, watched intently as one was unwrapped.

They were boots, as it turned out. Gaudy red and gold boots, with an array of buckles over the top and flight stabilizing jets on the sides, pointed down and slightly forwards, and a repulsor that looked like it might pivot from a downward angle to an angle horizontal to the ground. The blue circle was situated on the back of his calf where the flight stabilizers usually went. Next came a pair of gauntlets that covered everything from the elbow down. They looked normal enough, save that they weren't attached to the rest of the Ironman armor, and there seemed to be a three foot spear with a one handed grip magnetized to each of them. Then the tall bag was opened and a pair of tall plastic… slabs (?!) emerged.

"What are those?" Loki caved, curiosity getting the better of him.

"Skis!" the human said, happily, as though the word meant anything to the god.

Said god waited in pointed silence for the man to elaborate.

"You know, locomotion on snow? Cross country or downhill? Basically the national sport of the winter? After hockey of course."

Mutely, Loki shook his head, but Tony kept going.

"Not that there are any lifts around here. Which is why I put repulsors on the boots. No way I'm climbing up the mountain on foot. It was either that, or a jetpack, and I made jetpacks go out of style before they were even invented."

"So they're for getting around on snow? Why not just bring the armor?"

"Oh Rudolph, they're for so much more than transportation."

-

Because of Loki's curiosity, Tony's cat-that-got-the-cream smirk, and Helbindi's wary guards, Loki ended up transporting a party of the king and three of his guards up the to a decent vantage point half way up the mountainside some time after the little mortal had departed.

The mapping of the Leylines had gone surprisingly quickly, so after only a couple of hours, it was pretty safe to take a break and check in with his partner.

Admittedly, a lot of Loki's questions were answered earlier, when Tony had snapped the 'skis' onto the bottom of his boots and fired up the repulsors to slide smoothly across the ice and towards the mountain. The awkwardly guarded spears were apparently meant for stabilization in the snow, and the repulsors couldn't be on the feet because that’s where they connected to the slabs -skis- so that all made sense. Save for the fact that Tony usually preferred to fly. This seemed… clunky compared to his usual sleek aerial arcs.

The group of five, covered in a small ward that Tony liked to call a 'repello muggletum' watched as the human slid up the mountain, and then, when he got to an area too rocky to traverse on his skis, stepped off of them and took a few repulsor powered leaps over the rough patches, only to reconnect the skis and continue up past their vantage point and out of sight.

"You are sure he is going to be able to cover all of the necessary ground in only five days?" Helbindi asked.

"Yes. This is… rather unusual for him, but I'm sure there is a reason." It had taken the man nearly two hours to get this far (the snow plains being as wide as they were,) and it was quite confusing actually. The king of the giants seemed to think so as well, given that he hadn't requested to be brought back to the palace.

They watched the small red helmet stop at a point much further up the mountain, maybe three quarters of the way to the top. He seemed to loiter there for a bit, before a midair metallic glint heralded the launch of a drone.

The guards were clearly bored and ready to depart, when all of a sudden the Aesir saw movement.

"…What?"

The little human was sliding down the mountainside. Very, very quickly.

Helbindi squinted at the Midgardian. "What is he doing?"

"Sliding, I think?"

Less than a minute later, Tony shot past their vantage point at breakneck speeds, crouched over the skis, spears held parallel to the ground under his arms. He approached the rocky portion of the mountain, angled for an overlooking hill of snow and, with an ecstatic whoop of laughter, flew right off the mountain through sheer momentum.

Every jaw had fallen open at this point, and they all watched the fragile little human hurtle over the precarious ground, land neatly with the help of the flight stabilizers, and, having lost almost none of his speed, disappear from sight behind a ridge.

Loki unceremoniously grabbed the king and his entourage, and teleported them to the base of the mountain.

On the flatter snow plains at the base of the mountains, they watched Tony speed back into view, make another ill advised jump off a mound of snow, slip 180 degrees until he was sliding backwards, right himself easily, and finally spot them.

The insane little mortal angled towards them, going full tilt with the backwards facing boot repulsors, and just as Loki thought that the man was going to intentionally crash into him, the repulsors cut out and Tony slammed the skis sideways to shower them in a wave of powdered snow.

Loki and the king brushed snow from their faces to the sound of Stark's raucous laughter.

"Now _that_ is some good skiing!" the man crowed, taking off the helmet and beaming like he hadn't just nearly died half a dozen times in as many minutes.

A thousand and one words tried to escape Loki all at once, and all that came out was a sort of strangled half screech. He grabbed the suicidal little ant by the shoulders and shook him a few times. "What are you doing!" he managed, after he stopped. He had to inspect him for injury after all.

"Skiing!" He said, as though that answered any of Loki's questions. "The fine art of getting from the top of the mountain to the bottom as fast as you can. Want to try?"

Loki decidedly did not want to try. What he wanted was to simultaneously hang the idiot by his ankles in a dungeon, and roll him into a cocoon of blankets and keep him in a safe padded room as far from any mountain as he could manage.

"Why- " he started, but too many things came to mind. "Why?" Oh Norns, that had come out nearly plaintive.

"Because it's fun? The adrenaline rush? Wind in your face, snow and ice and skill, and beautiful vistas flying by?"

"You could have died. You nearly died!"

Tony grabbed his face with his gauntlets. "Babe, I've been skiing since I was four. I'm capable of flying. At no point in time was I going to die."

Loki looked over at the faces of Helbindi and his guards. None of them seemed convinced either.

"No." He stated. And then he brought them all back to the palace.

 

\--

(Once, while they were cuddling and drinking champagne many months ago, Loki had finally brought up the topic.

"You told me once that Thor mentioned that I was adopted."

Tony, back against his chest, didn't tense up at all. He must have heard the hesitation in Loki, though. The taut muscle in his arms, the way the flute glass shivered for just a moment.

"Yeah, a long time ago," he casually intoned. Loki waited for the prompt to go on, but it never game. The mortal would let this drop at any moment, if he wanted it.

"Did he tell you anything more than that?"

"Not really. He might've implied that you weren't the same species as him, but well, given that we all look the same anyway, no one bothered asking further."

Loki rolled the stem of the glass in his fingers, watching the fine bubbles rise.

"I only look the same as you and the Aesir because of magic. This… isn't how I was born."

His lover finally squirmed to crane his neck and look up at him. Something in the mage's face must have spooked him, because he finished the twist with his body, until he was sitting astride Loki's lap, facing him. His drink was placed on the table, and Loki's own was plucked from his fingers to join it. Tony took his face in both hands. "Loki. What you look like will not change how I feel about you. You could be an orange jellyfish and. Wait. No. Not a jellyfish. But like, you could be seriously weird, and I wouldn't care. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I love you."

Loki held the gaze as long as he could before leaning in to hide his face in his lover's neck. The hands that had cupped his face, slid around his back to hold him closer. There were no words he could say. No assurances he wanted, or caveats to barter for. For all his famed silver tongue had served him well over the years, sometimes, there were no words.

Slowly, he let himself turn blue.)

\--

 

Once he was done laughing over 'the rush' of skiing, and his partner's -completely justified- reaction, Tony settled into the workroom, unpacked a rather large computer assembly, and called back his drones.

Loki refused to go back to the Leylines, and chose instead, to watch his lover putter contentedly around the room until they were summoned for lunch.

Tony seemed perfectly content to settle back into the safety of his data and models after eating, so Loki set a ward on the door-frame to let him know if the man decided to leave, and went back to the western Lines.

Thankfully for Loki's nerves, Tony didn't try to leave the rooms, and the rest of the day was uneventful. The engineer reported favorable progress on his map over supper, and went to bed with little fuss.

Which was why Loki really should have known better. Panicked, but somehow unsurprised, he emerged alone from their room the next morning, and went straight to Helbindi in the throne room.

They sent out a search party, and immediately found a pair of ski tracks going to the northern mountains, which were conveniently closer. Loki paired up with one of the Jotun tracking teams, and followed the trail for three quarters of an hour until the smooth parallel tracks suddenly vanished.

"He flew away," the god said.

One of the trackers whipped his head around in alarm. "The mortal can fly?" he asked, incredulous.

"When it suits him."

"This was all a diversion then," a second giant concluded.

"We must return to the palace at once!"

The third guard seized Loki by the upper arm, apparently to drag him bodily back to Urtgard, but the mage simply rolled his eyes and relocated all four of them in an instant. They reappeared at the main gates of the city, where, much to their surprise, Helbindi was awaiting their arrival.

"I was wondering if you would return," he rumbled. "The tracks you followed were a diversion then?"

"Yes, My King," the guard holding Loki's arm said. "You have found the mortal?"

"He is on the western mountains again. Skiing."

Loki could feel his hear his teeth grinding.

"I had a scout sent to the place he stopped yesterday. We will bring him back."

"King Helbindi, I feel I must apologize. He is not usually so lax in his work ethic."

The royal raised his eyebrow. Loki was starting to believe that it was his only facial gesture, given the stoic countenance he wore at every other instance. "He is so free with his life then? And he so easily disregards your concern?"

"Not if I have any say in things."

The eyebrow was mocking him.

"Don't worry, I'll be taking the skis. This won't happen again."

-

All through lunch Tony insisted that he was perfectly safe, and that it was ridiculous that his lover had hidden the skis away in his magic spacefold. By the end of it, king Helbindi even seemed to be taking his side.

Again Loki warded the door to the workroom before he left Tony to his data analysis and mapping. Then he teleported out to the western edge of the jagged tear the Bifrost had rent, and finished mapping the Leylines there, and all the way back through the city, in one long fit of frantic overworking.

By supper, he'd calmed down enough to realize that Tony and Helbindi had, at some point, struck an alarming camaraderie. With all the surly over-protectiveness that he couldn't be bothered to hide, he marched his lover back to their chamber, determined to tire him out so thoroughly that he'd sleep until noon.

He woke to an empty bed anyway.

Barely clothed and more angry than scared (though he was worried. Just worried, not scared. He was too proud a warrior to be scared) he barreled into the throne room, only to find it empty.

"The king and the mortal are inspecting the eastern range today, Sir," a helpful giant said, when she saw him wavering back and forth in the doorway.

Loki narrowed his eyes, and checked his pocket space. He still had the skis, so were they actually working?

After clothing himself properly and locating a guide to the eastern city gate, he found a pair of helpful guards, one of whom agreed to escort him along the tracks that the king and his daily entourage had left in the snow.

"They departed just after dawn," the chatty Jotun said. "The King didn’t say why, of course, but he seemed pleased. No doubt your mortal is fine."

"If he's doing what I think he's doing, fine is not the word that will describe him at the end of the day."

The guard seemed deeply perturbed by this, and stopped talking.

The eastern mountains were more of a series of large rolling hills that eased into the snow plains very gently. Covering ground as quickly as his magic could let him, he found that he was nearly a third of the way up one of the slopes before he spotted the red helmet of his boneheaded human.

The red spot was sliding down the slope, but much more slowly, and in a wavy, nearly zigzag pattern. And there were four dark blue dots trailing it.

 _A chase_ was Loki's first thought, immediately followed by panic, but then one of the blue dots seemed to tumble, kicking up a large puff of snow before sliding a little ways. Tony's figure stopped abruptly, and the other three blue dots did so with various levels of jerkiness. Another one fell over.

Tony slowly shuffled over to the first fallen Jotun, helped him up, and slid down to the second, who was already back on his feet. Then they all proceeded down the mountain again, repeating their slow weaving pattern and throwing up puffs of snow on every turn.

Loki and his guard marched up the hill to meet them.

"What." The mage hissed, when his wayward lover skidded to a halt in front of him, "do you think you're doing!"

"Snowboarding!"

Somewhere in his forehead, a muscle was pulsing.

"His Majesty asked for skiing lessons, but since you'd confiscated my skis, I thought I'd teach him snowboarding instead."

There was a new device strapped to Tony's feet, when he bothered to check. A single wide board, only slightly shorter than the human was tall, with contraptions to hold both boots in place, and swivel mounted flight stabilizers on the ends. No doubt there were repulsors on the bottom as well.

Similarly, Helbindi and the three guards that accompanied him all had boards of the same proportions on their own feet. Theirs were made of ice, however, and if the Jotun were propelling them as Tony was wont to do, it would have been through their ice powers.

"I see." Loki restrained himself from glaring at the king. "I don't suppose it would be appropriate to head back for a meal now, would it?"

The king swept an appraising look over Loki's visibly tense form, and turned to Stark. "Let us go down one more time, and then we will return to the palace."

Loki's teeth hurt.

\--

The snowboard wasn't confiscated. Helbindi liked the thing for some reason, so Tony gamely handed it over to the king's best ice workers to figure out how to replicate the smooth curves and slight flexibility. The engineer himself passed out in their bed to catch up on the sleep he had missed. He'd tried whining for coffee, but the god was not in a giving mood.

While he slept, Loki spelled the furs in an entanglement charm, and went to map the eastern end of the Bifrost tear. He came back late, but victorious, and was pleased to see that his mortal had woken, tried to leave the bed, and was now thoroughly wrapped in the furs, balled up and stuck on the floor.

"I hate you," the man pouted.

"Of course you do," he replied vindictively. He picked up the bundle and deposited it back on the bed. Then he wrapped himself around it and went to sleep, happily ignoring his lover's whining.

He woke up blue.

Helbindi and the attendant that cleaned the bedding daily were hovering in the doorway, eyes wide, and eyebrows up.

The mage peeled a fur off of his bed mate to hide behind, and then shifted back to his Aesir skin. Both the onlookers were gone by the time Loki managed to rouse Tony from his stupor.

They made it through the morning meal with an unfortunate number of speculative glances thrown Loki's way. Tony, thankfully, didn't notice. He'd gone from having too little sleep, to having too much sleep, and was busy yawning every other second, complete with jaw popping sounds.

"That really doesn't sound healthy," the king murmured, after a particularly drawn out yawn.

Tony finally managed to close his mouth, and made doe eyes at his lover.

"Fine," the mage caved, bringing out the thermos of coffee.

Tony planted a wet kiss on his cheek and proceeded to inhale his beverage.

"You know, Prince Loki, you are more than welcome to join us in snowboarding today." Helbindi said, faux casually.  "You may find that it comes more naturally to you than I'd initially thought it would."

"I couldn't possibly," Loki retorted, not making eye contact.

"And why not? You finished your mapping yesterday, or so the guards tell me."

No ready reply came to his lips.

"You should go, babe," Stark said with a nudge to his ribs. "I'll be stuck inside all day with the data. You'll be bored if you stay with me."

It was Loki's turn to raise an eyebrow. "You intend to stay indoors?"

"Well, somebody trapped me in a mess of blankets all afternoon yesterday, so I didn't get anything done."

"Good. It's decided then," the Jotun king interjected. "Lord Stark will finish his work and you will accompany us, Prince Loki."

Somehow, this was Tony's fault, he was sure.

-

"So how was it?" Tony asked, when Loki stumbled into their room late that night.

Muffled by the pillows that he'd face planted into, the "I hate you," was barely discernible.

Tony patted his shoulder. "So you liked it then."

Loki flipped him the bird and Tony laughed.

 

\--

 


End file.
